Nuclear energy isn’t clean or a solution

Uravan, in southern Colorado,
was once a bustling uranium mill town in the remote West End of my
home county. There, employees transformed uranium ore into green
sludge, not knowing that it would be used in the atomic bombs
dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now, Uravan is a deserted
cleanup site, too hazardous for anyone to live in. Chainlink fence
encloses ponds full of radioactive salts.

In the
surrounding hills, thorium still laces the ground where cattle
graze, and tailings heaped outside of open pit uranium mines
continue to leach runoff into the San Miguel River.

So it
was with some consternation that I learned recently about the
resurgence of uranium mining in the West End. After 20 years of
dormancy, new owners of the Cotter Corp. have been granted a permit
to mine uranium in San Miguel County. Apparently, there’s a
sudden demand for yellowcake, a 300 percent price jump, and
President Bush says, "It is time for this country to start building
nuclear power plants again."

Industry spokespeople at a
Uranium Expo recently held in Grand Junction, Colo., agreed that
we’re on the precipice of a "Third Uranium Boom," claiming
"the sky is the limit," as they urged investors to get back in the
game. Even some environmentalists support a resurgence of nuclear
power as the only antidote to global warming. After all, nuclear
energy does not involve burning fossil fuels, and in that sense,
it’s "clean."

But to say that nuclear energy is
clean is to use one of those over-simplified, fuzzy euphemisms.
It’s true that we’d solve the problem of emissions by
going nuclear, but then we’d increase the problem of what to
do with radioactive waste and the risk of a nuclear meltdown, two
reasons why building nuclear power plants was phased out by the
1980s.

As my neighbor put it when I mentioned the
country’s renewed interest in uranium, "Didn’t we learn
anything the last time?"

Industry pundits say we have
made advancements. A geologist at the Expo said the atomic-power
business has seen a continual evolution of design and safety for 30
years. Yet if one examines the record of the Cotter Corp., the same
problems persist. Cotter is an affiliate of General Atomics, whose
recent attempt to import 10 million pounds of radioactive soil from
New Jersey and to store it at Cañon City has been forestalled
by the Colorado Legislature.

Why? Because radioactive
waste is hazardous, and no one wants to live near it. That is why
Nevada is adamant about never opening the federal repository
planned for Yucca Mountain.

In Colorado, Cotter Corp. has
accumulated 140 violations of environmental and public health
regulations since it began operating in 1959, most recently because
an employee ingested uranium when a pipeline broke at the
Cañon City mill. And since General Atomics manufactures
weapons, will depleted uranium from Colorado be used in weapons and
expose our troops to radioactive dust, which happened in the first
Gulf War? As for the risk of a meltdown, a simple failure of
communication nearly caused one at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile
Island, which doesn’t give one faith that it couldn’t
happen today. "To err is human," as Shakespeare wrote.

It
is equally disconcerting that the Bush administration has ordered
our national laboratories to begin research on new nuclear weapons
designs and to prepare the underground test sites in Nevada for
nuclear tests, if necessary, in the future. If we are serious about
stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons, do we want to be
exporting more yellowcake?

Nuclear energy is not our only
option to our mainstays, coal and oil. Besides solar, wind, biomass
and small-scale hydropower, there is Jimmy Carter’s seemingly
forgotten suggestion: energy conservation. This can be achieved
through economic incentives, as is done now in Aspen, where
households that consume more energy pay higher taxes. Conversely,
businesses that convert to alternative energies, for example the
New Belgium Brewing Co. of Ft. Collins, which generates electricity
from brewing waste, should be granted tax exemptions.

America is an inventive nation, but resorting to nuclear power
isn’t inventive; it’s just plain backwards.

Rhonda Claridge is a contributor to Writers on the Range,
a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She
lives and writes in Telluride, Colorado.